The thought of the pristine being smudged is always guiltily satisfying.

Scouting For Girls have been at number one in the pop charts, with a typically limp suggestion of a song for two weeks now. This will not stand. What better way to wreak vengeful havoc than hearing their Auntie-Rock desecrated with a really filthy remix?

My nomination for such audio vandalism is Gold Blood, who seem to have the New Band Holy Triumvirate clutched tightly in their clammy hands: substance, momentum and a damn good name.

In songs like Don’t Waste My Time, the legit-retro stainless style of …

Expectations: quashed. Norms: avoided. Head: scratched. Not Squares use cowbells, ‘dirty synths’, tight double-speed drums and disco basslines, and yet the band is not instantly hateful and their songs are not the kind of generic ADHT nonsense found on mobile phone adverts. So what gives?

Call me a naive, old cynic, but what drives me up the wall is when a two-bit band scrabble aboard the most fleeting of bandwagons, whelp out a truly woeful, turgid two-bit song and make a success of themselves, all because they were bright/stupid enough to harmonise with the two-bit musical flavour du jour.…

Now, how to end the week? In a blaze of crucfyingly harsh Thrash/Dubstep-hybrid noise? Or a sub-heartbeat soundscape flutter? Look, I’m lying: the amount of planning that goes into ANBAD could be etched onto the back of a gnat, and yet this haphazard approach works more often than not.

For example – Today’s New Band, Chicken Feed, make music that’s gossamer-thin, delicate and sugary: it turns out that they’re the perfect week-ending wind-down soundtrack. If you were planning a big night out, I’m sorry. But a good snooze is just as cool, yeah?

Duck Egg Diner, emerging from a …

”Trams! Inaugural trams!” squeaked Super Furry Animals recently in their song, er, Inaugural Trams. It is one of the few songs that fully celebrates the unbridled joys of rail travel. Trains, despite the inevitable delays, the woeful onboard food and the crummy stations, are still the superior method of transport.

Sitting at a desk with a cool drink; to be able to get up and go to the loo as and when your bladder desires; flirting with a recently-boarded and now concerned stranger; watching a beautiful series of Welsh valleys huff past your window – you just don’t find …

Deep breath, and straight in: Today’s New Band, Kezzie Beat, makes music that is nerdy, obscure, almost incomprehensibly repetitive and mainly of interest to a selected few who consider early 90′s videogames to have the Best Music Ever. For these reasons alone, we should laud bands like this as a precious commodity.

To take a Gameboy or a NES as a starting point from which to make music isn’t really as unusual as it may seem. Limiting your sonic options in this way is akin to a band picking the same combo of drums, bass and guitar as a …

Almost astonishingly, today we publish the 100th band to appear on A New Band A Day. A Centenary! A Double Golden Jubilee! This is a (very) minor achievement of sorts, considering my attention span is comparable with that of the proverbial goldfish, and the transient nature of the Tubular Interwebs. However, it’s a happy occasion I suppose, even though I didn’t receive a telegram from the Queen.

Like truculent teenagers though, we don’t want to celebrate this too much, and would prefer to remain sulkily opposed to convention, whilst secretly longing for participation in it. Thus, Today’s new band …

A New Band A Day continues its trawl through the Best of, er… Bestival

A.N.B.A.D. is about to go on holiday. Not the kind of holiday we’ve been on recently, when canvas, mud, cider and temperatures approaching zero Kelvin have been the primary features, but one in France, where the sun is out all the time, the steak is de cheval and the music is one of two options: Stupidly bangin’ or merely stupid.

But before we cram ourselves with the rest of the cattle on the cheapo flight out there and dream of all the vin rouge…

One accusation that I sometimes hear levelled at the truly incredible Boards Of Canada is that they’ve found a ‘sound’, and just ground out three albums’ worth of songs that are all slight variations on a theme. There is probably an element of truthiness in this, but frankly, fans of BoC don’t care. They just want MORE, because even assuming that BoC are a one-trick pony, it’s such a wonderful trick, complaining just sounds silly.

But what would BoC sound like, if, you know, they shuffled things up a bit? Well, maybe somewhere close to Today’s New Band, 747Music…

Just as the Emo scene attracts people who like to wear black, cut outrageously stupid fringes and look identical to one another, and the Nu-Rave scene attracts 15 year olds who want a legitimate reason to dance to Scooter, the Chiptune set attracts people who are A) Nerds and B) Musicians. This is an unusual combo – mathematically-minded musicians are hard to come by – you don’t hear Thom Yorke yapping about logarithms. Actually, that’s probably a bad example, but you get my point. Nevertheless, the Chiptune scene is a monster on the Tubular Interwebs, and we have lavished much …

What would the sound of sleep be like? Silence? A deeeep humming noise? Your parents’ voices chanting “blood….blood…blood” over and over again? Something similar to the noise when you load a game into a ZX Spectrum? We may never know.

Or perhaps we will – because Today’s New Band, oMMM, produces songs that are apparently “spaced out bedcore…a bedtime pop experiment!” Don’t let that fool you, though – this music isn’t like Side Two of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. Instead, oMMM is a musical trip, a treat of inventive bleeping and what could be hesitantly described …